Gabriel Pombo Da Silva – “Don Pedro” (an authentic stoic)

Don Pedro was (and may still be) a “true Stoic,” a “Unique” and “Egoist” being who ended up in prison for killing or stabbing someone (I have never been able to find out the entirety of that chapter of his life)…

I met him in the “Special Department” (FIES module) of “El Acebuche,” in Almería. Physically, he was a person who perfectly matched that stereotype we all have of Don Quijote: relatively tall, thin, in his fifties, with a pointy grey goatee and short hair…

He walked very erect, exaggeratedly majestic, but most remarkable of all was his tone of voice and manner of expression. He spoke very slowly and he conscientiously selected each word while fixing his gaze (which oscillated between arrogance and irony) on a person, trying to uncover whether or not his interlocutor was worth his time and would comprehend what he was trying to express…

They say that he had been a professor of literature (which is plausible enough) at some institute in Valencia. The reason why he ended up in FIES was not, certainly, for participating in protests, riots or escapes… That would have gone against his “values” and “philosophical principles,” not in vain and aside from considering himself a “True Nietzschian,” I would presume because of his misanthropy…

No, Don Pedro took out the eye of a prison guard when he put it up to the door’s “snitch” to see what he was doing in the cell… From this incident on, the existence of Don Pedro was a long drawn-out pilgrimage through the special prisons of the Spanish democracy…

It is obvious to say that he did not “lower” himself to “denouncing” the innumerable times that he was the target of beatings and torture by the guards.

Even though we (the FIES) had the habit of laughing at him (or more than him, at his “philosophy of life”) we fell “sympathetic” to his “particularity,” and because his hatred for the guards was real and whenever they gave him the opportunity he sought confrontation with them.

Don Pedro liked to converse with me… he could never understand how “someone like me” (a student of Philosophy with a great knowledge of/about the works of Nietzsche) could “be a Marxist” (he could never understand the differences between Anarchism and Communism; and even less so Anarchist Communism) and “embrace metaphysical illusions”…

So we killed the time: sometimes we spoke (philosophized?) about the philosophers of Mileto, about Diogenes Laertius, Socrates-Plato-Aristotle, to wind up with his Master–Nietzsche–and his favorite work, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”…

Sometimes I lie in bed with my gaze fixed on the ceiling and I imagine Don Pedro speaking about this philosophical fusion of his master with a political “ideology” like Nihilism… and I laugh…

Don Pedro–a stoic and misanthropic “Over-Man” so consistent with himself that he refused to allow any kind of “transcendence” to live over him, enemy of humanity and of humanism, egoist and unique–no one who has not met him personally knows about his life and his work materialized in himself–in his ethic…!!

And for him everything was reduced to this: the “over-man” was his ethic and his moral, his attitude before and in the face of adversity and the existent–without regret or glory…

Because, obviously, if there is no ethic and moral (which is, in sum, a way of conceiving oneself to oneself and acting consequently) then it’s all the same anyway* and we would end up in a “relativism” that has nothing to do with the philosophical current of modern stoicism.

I imagine him all erect saying: Those are “charlatans,” “Don Pombo,” charlatans!!

It is worth mentioning that Don Pedro referred to those he respected as “Don” and to the rest as “you”… He was (and/or is) a true Stoic: Don Pedro…

Gabriel,
Early September 2012,
Aachen.

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* This is a vague substitution of one idiomatic expression for another. The original is lo mismo da que da lo mismo – translator.

“Throw yourself into Freedom, that is my proposal: loot, rob, burn, assault the one who exploits you, destroy authority, which conditions and imprisons us. Do not seek leaders, aspire to your freedom. Break with the logic of power and with those who sustain it.”